Tuesday, August 31, 2010

[alt: I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!]

I am very tempted to go the xkcdexplained route here and just write the following analysis and nothing else:

"Mr. Beret is excited because of science. His enthusiasm is lost on a sleepy man."

Alas, my nature compels me to elaborate.

I guess the fun in this comic is supposed to come from his child-like enthusiasm - a common enough theme in xkcd. Often it seems to be set up in way which, like in the comic above, the message is that those who do not have childlike glee are missing out on something and the childlike person is happier and better than the other. They nearly all feel like ripoffs of Calvin and Hobbes, which perhaps was able to get away with this by having its childlike excitement come from an actual child.

I suppose another feature of this comic that is meant to be positive is that he is excited about science in the abstract, and not in any way that will affect him (note the "in a few generations" line). Are we supposed to feel the same way? I hope not. Future scientific discoveries are not always those which people expected several generations earlier, and some things, like travel to another planet with intelligent life, seems too remote to even consider getting excited about.

We are left to conclude that Mr. Beret is a figure to be laughed at for his naiveté. I guess that is starting to be a somewhat defining characteristic for him (finally!) - he is dumb and/or enthusiastic. I am guessing we'll have a few more of these comics which will get very boring very suddenly. Dumb people can be lots of fun but the "I am excited about silly things" trope is rather narrow.

Lastly, the ending to this comic is atrocious, with a print-comicesque line from the sleeping guy and a nonsensical response from Mr. Beret. All of it constitutes post-punchline dialog.

Calvin and Hobbes also had character dynamics rather than a bunch of interchangeable stickmen running around. No, Mr. Beret doesn't count as a consistent character, since until now he has pretty much shown none.

It's also worth noting that the primary barrier to project orion is political, and mining uranium from space wouldn't solve that. Also project orion was interplanetary, and there was a more advanced (and prohibitively expensive) version for interstellar travel.

I wasn't amused by the latest one, but I imagine it'd be funny if it was a spur-of-the-moment conversation. The "Type C" XKCD comic that is hypothetically funny, but adapted in the wrong medium/method.

Well, Carl, at least this time you've got it all wrong.There is no post punchline dialog. Why?Mr. Beret builds up a silly kind of urgency from panel 1 through to panel 4's "Come on!"Yes, he's using science as a vehicle for that but that's not significant at all.Important is the timeframe of that 'urgent' development which is "a few generations" i.e. at least some 40 to 60 years.After the sleepy man begs for some more time to "snooze" the punchline "just once" would give him some 10 to 15 minutes more.The disparity of those timeframes makes up the joke and the punchline ends the dialog just as it should be.You've got it all wrong. Randall wins - you lose.

Carl, you dimwit! You can't have post punchline dialogue if you don't have a punchline to begin with!

This comic really sucks. It has walls of text for basically no purpose, it'd be better if it WAS text-only(say, a blog post) and it tries to pass off a change of tone as a punchline.

And what the heck is that third panel? What the heck is that pose? How the heck are we supposed to take any expression from that expressionless stick figure?!

Finally... Mr. Beret enrages me. He enrages me because he's the epitome of Randall's clumsy characterization skills. He can't just create a character and stick to what he's supposed to do, no. So we have a character who was once obsessed with bakeries, then existentialist(sort of), then somehow linked to Lord of the Rings, and now he's a stupid poor man's Carl Sagan. One thing I really think Randall should do is try to develop his characters better, instead of just cramming them in whatever role he needs at the time!

And no, I'm not gonna read today's comic. It probably sucks, anyway, so I won't give Randall the traffic!

@Anon1108: Maybe the sine wave is supposed to be the Shuttle's course plot? Although if that's the case he could've at least bothered to draw a map under it. With Randall's art, it could be anything I suppose.

Does anyone else think that is a terrible drawing of a bed? Yes, all the art in xkcd is pretty sucky, but if you're going to put that much effort (more than 5 lines) into drawing a bed, maybe pick an angle that doesn't make it look like a fucked up birthday cake.

My first thought was that this is a pretty ridiculous way to handle a comic that is even slightly about the Middle East conflict. My next thought was that if Randall had tried to take it more seriously, he almost certainly would have made a worse comic: maybe more offensive, maybe less informed, but sucky either way.

So this is probably the best thing he could have done for a Middle East conflict comic. But my third and final thought for the day is: why did he need to do it at all?

787 is an interesting example. It's clearly meant to be a witty commentary on the outright silly nature of conflict over the names of places, yet is simply bland, inoffensive pap that, were the art better and the "dammit" removed, you could probably find in the newspaper next to Family Circus. Then there's the fact that it takes place at NASA, firmly setting it in nerd-joke territory. If you threw in a reference to cunnilingus, it could easily be the prototype from which all other xkcd strips were made.

@anon 7:05: Soldiers wear berets. It pleases me to pretend that beret-guy is actually a special forces operative, that his contrived "wackiness" is his way of emulating the pseudo-humor (pseudo- in the sense of pretending to be something) of the comic to better infiltrate, and that he'll soon kill the rest of the characters so we don't have to suffer anymore.

@Anon705: Jamie Hyneman wears a beret, and he's pretty high on the list of most awesome people currently alive. :P

@Michael: I didn't mean to imply that he'd been there personally, just that he should probably realize that NASA uses technology nowadays that looks more modern than what it had during the Apollo era.

And anyone who watches NASA TV on occasion (and since I do that, surely Randall "OMG everybody should be super excited about space!" Munroe does too... right?) would know what both the Space Shuttle and ISS Mission Control Centers look like.

What's with the space thing in 786/787? Is Randall suddenly getting all nostalgic about the days when he still had a real job again? On an unrelated note, holy crap check out what those crazy kids at Uncyclopedia are doing today. Good for a chuckle or two maybe.

I believe you may have missed the joke on 786, as well as most of the other commenters. The can I hit the snooze button bit is the punchline, because in this comic Beret man is this guy's alarm clock. When I first read it that's what I thought, and I found it actually amusing.

@Ian: similarly I punch puppies (not kittens; I like kittens) in the face every time somebody complains about scientific rigor on Mythbusters.

It's a popular TV show on Discovery, what did you expect? It's funny, it's clever, it teaches people not to take everything at face value, they're not afraid to admit when they got it wrong, and it has explosions. That's enough for me.

And I should point out that I am an actual scientist, as in someone who does science for a living.

The one thing I loathe about mythbusters: the twelve million clones on Discovery and National Geographic with CRAZY WACKY DUDES who talk LOUDLY AND EXCITEDLY designing CRAZY SCIENCE STUFF on a GRUNGY SET WITH A WHITEBOARD to BLOW STUFF UP!

This is EVERY show on Discovery Channel now. And it's because of Mythbusters.

Granted, the sublime Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars for the uncivilized) was also an inspiration.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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